This project is designed to accomplish four interrelated goals: 1) to test whether polyphosphates (or polyphosphonates) can bind simultaneously to both gadolinium (III) ions and calcified objects and thus act as potential magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) agents for calcified agents such as kidney stones; 2) to test whether polycarboxylic acids bind sufficiently to gadolinium (III) ions to acts as MRI agents for the gastrointestinal tract and to determine the effect on relaxation rates of solution water protons of varying chain lengths from an average molar weight of 2,000 to 2,000,000; 3) to implement a reliable and convenient technique for measuring proton relaxation times on a commonly used, commercial NMR spectrometer system; and 4) to synthesize several model gadolinium phosphate or carbonxylate complexes and to characterize their structure by X-ray crystallography.